


sweet dreams.

by kuraku



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Blood and Gore, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 06:25:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16362602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuraku/pseuds/kuraku
Summary: baekhyun has a recurring dream he's murdered by a man he's never met. he thinks it’s stupid until he goes on a blind date and sees him at the table.【12 HORRORS 2018 FIC FEST → #C81 】





	sweet dreams.

Baekhyun jerks awake, suddenly, drenched in sweat.

His heart, pounding, sounds the same as his roommate’s fist on the front door, demanding to be let inside after forgetting his keys. It sounds the same as the bass that pulses through the floor on Friday nights—sometimes Saturdays, never Sundays, because there’s work the next day. It sounds like what Baekhyun imagines an explosion to be, or the kickback from a pistol after firing it. That loud, thick pounding in his ears, thumping, flooding his body with adrenaline and then, just as suddenly, drawing it all back in again like a puddle of liquid in reverse. His eyes squint in the darkness, and the neon glow of his alarm clock comes into focus as he turns to read it. It’s just past three in the morning. Baekhyun has to get up for work in a few hours. His body feels tight and loose, clenching and relaxing, twisted and then calm.

It’s the same nightmare. The same dream, over and over. These sorts of things are what people pay psychiatrists for—this is the sort of thing that can mess up someone’s life if they aren’t careful. Baekhyun thinks that sometimes, mental illness is just like a long stack of dominoes. If you knock one over, the rest will come toppling with it. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t told anyone about them, or maybe it’s just that he’s too chickenshit to admit that he needs help. Maybe he isn’t sure he’ll like what it means. Maybe he’s afraid the nightmares are some sort of precursor for some dangerous disease, and that the dreams mean his brain is deteriorating, or worse, locking him inside some invisible hell. (And this, this is what happens when Baekhyun thinks about things in the dark at three AM.)

The bedroom feels hot despite the fan on; there’s only air conditioning in the main area of the apartment, and at the request of his roommate, Baekhyun keeps his door closed at night. Privacy issues or something. His roommate isn’t really the ‘accepting’ type, and Baekhyun likes sleeping naked sometimes. Reason being: the shirt that Baekhyun peels off, dropping it onto the floor, is still damp, and the cool, oscillating air feels good on his back as he shifts onto his stomach, chin sinking down into the pillow.

There are small differences, of course, but every night—perhaps this is an exaggeration, given that Baekhyun hasn’t been keeping track of every single night that it’s happened—the dream is the same. There’s a man there: he’s handsome, and sort of Baekhyun’s type, if he’s being completely honest, but that’s a weird thing to think about someone in the position that the other man is in, so he tries not to. Still, in his mind’s eye, he can’t help the way his heart aches a little at the sight: tall, but not too tall, slender but well-built, like Baekhyun will find muscles that ripple and flex underneath the pale skin that houses them. The man has the body of a dancer, Baekhyun thinks, the kind that’s strong on the inside, lithe and shapely on the outside. The face? Soft, delicate features that melt around stiff cheekbones, a hard jaw, and full, plush lips; they’re probably good for kissing, but Baekhyun has never seen anything quite so loving from them.

Every night, the dream is the same. The location might change a little: sometimes there are lights that shine through, the kind of floodlights the police put up when searching an area in the dark, like a swamp or a forest: the kind that make footprints more apparent, the kind that make blood glisten, sparkle off leaves and trees. Other times it’s dark and clouded, damp, like the inside of a dungeon, where mold builds gleefully along the unkept brick and mortar and the air feels thick with disdain, like there’s never going to be another chance to experience the relief of sunlight. Either way, somehow—and this is the weird part—Baekhyun can always make out the man’s face in the dark.

The man doesn’t seem to care as much about his features as Baekhyun, naive and unsuspecting at first, does, and usually there’s dirt or grime smeared around his cheeks, drawn from dirty fingernails and grubby knuckles. Sometimes Baekhyun’s blood is added to it, either the result of misting from initial attacks or from later, when the fear changes to anger and Baekhyun spits a mouthful at him, around a split lip, and the man takes it because he likes it.

Yeah, it’s a weird fucking thing, but Baekhyun’s been dreaming about being murdered for months now.

He’s usually restrained, somehow, because after all, how the hell else would he be in this situation? Sometimes it’s with rope, knotted and double-knotted into complicated configurations, or with shackles that are too heavy for him to lift, and even if he could, what would he do with them? Sometimes he’s stretched out along a dirty mattress; sometimes he’s bound in a chair.

It’s not just murder, because his subconscious isn’t that kind. No, there’s always torture first, the kind that makes his skin crawl when he’s awake, the kind that invades his thoughts and makes it hard to focus at work. He’s even called out sick because of it.

His fingernails, pried off one by one, peeled until the cuticles crack and the skin underneath, raw and surprised, throbs in annoyance—only to have it cut with scissors, split until Baekhyun’s crying, the tears bulging down his face in shame. The sight of them, piled into a dirty bucket, always makes Baekhyun want to vomit. Somehow it’s worse—he’s never looked down on his hands after that, too fearful that the sight of them would push him over the edge.

His eyelids, tugged and pried open and then, finally, in annoyance of their inability to stay alert, pressed to his brow bone. Baekhyun’s seen a movie once where the girl got them stapled open—he’s never been so lucky. His eyelids are threaded through with the prick of a needle and thread, sewn into his skin, and the blood that trickles down his forehead mixes with futile tears and creates a cloud, painful and burning, over the curve of his vision. (He imagines, eventually, he would go blind. Maybe death is a kindness, sometimes, in situations like these.)

His stomach, carved open carefully, separated at the navel into two useless flaps of skin, as if he’s some cadaver on the table of a medical hospital, ready to be mistakenly maneuvered by first-yearn students. It’s this sort of thing, in movies, that makes him think— _wouldn’t you die of shock_? No, no, there’s a sick sort of fascination that invades your thoughts instead when those dirty, germ-ridden hands cup your insides like a kid clutching for a pile of candy out of a Halloween bowl. Slowly, his intestines are unraveled like a ball of yarn. Sometimes the man ties them up along a clothes rack, hanging them out to dry. Sometimes he cuts them up. Pools of blood and discolored liquid splurt out of them, trickling onto the floor.

Baekhyun’s lost fingers, toes. He’s had his eyeballs popped out of their sockets only to be replaced with pieces of glass. His bones have been broken and set again, his tongue cut out and welded back in place. He’s been castrated, waterboarded, lit on fire...

And the sweet release of death, the realization that the pain, the smell of blood, the desperation and lack of hope will disappear into merciful darkness—it never comes. Not fully, anyway. Baekhyun anticipates it, sees the killing blow and thinks: this is it, this will be the end, there’s no more, there can’t be more after this—

And then Baekhyun jerks awake, suddenly, drenched in sweat.

 

 

Dating in Seoul is hard for straight people, surely, with so many choices and so many options crammed into a small space, where one wrong date could affect a whole lifeline of potential dates, like cutting one of the finite cords keeping a person alive in a hospital bed. For gays, it’s even harder—Baekhyun’s used apps before and hated it, been to clubs and never gotten more than one-night stands, and lately he’s resorted to blind dates and introductions from his friends, which he hates almost as much as the feeling of shame after swiping ‘yes’ on multiple people and never getting a match. Still, he trusts Chanyeol’s judgement—after all, the guy has been lucky enough to have snagged multiple long-term relationships in the past, and so when Chanyeol says he’s got ‘just the guy’ for Baekhyun, he doesn’t refuse. Shamefully, even, he holds onto a small glimmer of hope: that this will finally be ‘it’, be the ‘one’ he’s been looking for, even if he isn’t quite sure such a thing exists. (He’s never quite wanted to fully buy into the idea of soulmates, as if that will protect him from the disappointment of potentially never finding one. Then he can say that he never believed in it in the first place, laugh it off, hurt on the inside, and remain achingly alone.)

The doors to the cafe jingle when Baekhyun walks through them, met with the cool breeze of air conditioning and the steady murmur of customers chatting, and his heart starts beating frantically in his chest, as if in warning. He’s just shy of what would be considered early, so he’s sure that his date hasn’t arrived yet—or if he has, he’s definitely not the type of person that Baekhyun wants to see in the long term. What kind of person is purposefully early to everything? Still, his eyes do a cursory scan of the interior and, after a moment, he weaves through tables full of laughing girls and those desperate for a place to study, and finds a two-person table in the back, near one of the heavy brick walls.

His bag is still where he left it, when he returns from the counter with an iced tea, sets the glass down on the table, and sinks into his seat. One of Baekhyun’s hands escapes into his pocket, fishing out the carefully folded paper flower that’s meant to be the signal for the other to find him, and arranges it on the table with long fingers that are doing their best to push away nerves, just like the rest of him. They reach for something to fiddle with and find the long straw in his glass, pushing it around in the ice with such determination that he doesn’t even notice the shadow of another, of someone standing just shy of his chair, until the someone clears their throat and startled, Baekhyun’s head jerks up with a bright smile already planted permanently in place.

It’s a relief that his immediate reaction is to beam, warm and pleased and full of pleasure, because his heart, startled and alarmed, immediately drops down into the pit of his stomach, drowning in the acid there, bubbling and fearful.

It’s him. It’s him. It’s him. It’s _him_.

Baekhyun is looking at his midnight murderer.

Baekhyun is looking. At. Him.

“Is this seat taken?” The man asks him, in a soft voice that brims with polite introduction—this is not the voice of his dreams, the voice that laughs at his pain, the voice that demands he speak, screams at him to apologize. This is a voice of kindness, a voice that invites the body attached to it into the seat across from Baekhyun—Baekhyun, who continues staring at him with a smile that, however permanently fixed, now starts to slip and slide at the edges, like a sticker beginning to peel, the glue dried and flaking along the lining.

“I hope I’m in the right place,” the man continues, while Baekhyun continues to smile. He watches, with eyes that dart open wider, recoiling in his head, as his body simply cannot react, cannot give away what he’s feeling, when the man’s hands dip into his jacket pocket and draw out a small purple paper flower, placing it on the table in front of them. It’s supposed to be a peace offering: Baekhyun, even in his state of panic, can see that, and somewhat stunned, he reaches forward to touch, carefully, at the folded paper, as if the feeling of it will wake him from what must surely be another dream.

His index finger jerks down along the edge of the flower, and a small prick of pain starts, an itchingly small paper cut, although when he draws his hand back, he can’t seem to find it.

So much for it being a dream, right?

Baekhyun realizes after what feels like the longest moment that the man is expecting him to talk. Stuttering forward, Baekhyun beams another smile. “Chanyeol sent you, right?” He says, pleased with himself, because his voice doesn’t shake, or reveal much of anything other than kindness. The man nods: he’s sitting carefully, his hands placed on his thighs in his lap, and like in the dream, Baekhyun finds himself absurdly attracted to him, in a way that feels painfully dangerous. (Well of course it’s fucking dangerous, he’s a murderer, isn’t he?)

Baekhyun shakes his head, imperceptibly, and places a hand against his chest. “I’m Baekhyun,” he introduces, and leans forward in expectation. He wants to know. He has to know—who is the person that has been plaguing him, for nights and nights?

“Yixing,” the man introduces himself, with a small bow of his head.

It’s odd—it sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Baekhyun’s head tilts, slightly.

Yixing, as it turns out, is not Korean at all—which was obvious enough. He came to Korea to study, apparently, and recently got out of a bad relationship. Really bad. Something happened to the girl he was seeing, and Yixing, guilty about it because of his bisexuality, started seeing men, exclusively, for now, something that Baekhyun can understand. It can be hard to straddle the line, and especially with a feeling like that: who would blame him?

Baekhyun wonders if Yixing can tell he’s grilling him: question after question comes spilling out of his mouth, desperate to find something, to figure something out. To understand why this is the man that has tortured him for nights on end.

Is it just in his head? This is something Baekhyun considers, after he listens to a particularly endearing tale about Yixing and his grandparents. It’s starting to feel ridiculous that this man, sitting in front of him, who feels familiar if only because of his mental images, could ever be the man who ripped his fingernails out or laughed at him when he choked on his own blood.

Yet Baekhyun can’t help the way his heart seizes when Yixing picks up a knife to slice cleanly through his bagel, or the way Yixing’s eyes seem to glitter with knowledge when their gazes meet.

A comfortable silence falls between them for a moment, and Baekhyun’s mind wanders. There are two options that he can safely rely on. One, being that his mind is playing tricks, associating Yixing with his mental trauma due to the similar nervousness of meeting a new person. Two, being that the dreams aren’t really dreams, but premonitions, and the man in front of him intends to do all of the things Baekhyun keeps imagining at night.

What options does he have, then? He could feign an illness, escape the cafe, move out of Seoul, change his name...

Pretty ridiculous thing to do based on some silly nightmares, right?

Yixing speaks up after a moment—after terrorizing his bagel into pieces, swallowing them all down, and Baekhyun stares at the carnage of crumbs on his plate and imagines it’s his insides there, strewn across the ceramic—and offers a particularly dazzling smile.

“You’re putting it together, aren’t you?”

Baekhyun’s chest thumps once, in warning. “What?” He rasps out.

“You only have yourself to blame,” Yixing continues softly—almost regretfully, in a voice that trails off, fading out at the end. What the hell is he pitying Baekhyun for? Like— _sorry that you fit my type, I’m a serial killer, it’s what I do_?

“This is your guilt talking,” Yixing says.

The murmur of the cafe appears to have come to a standstill. Baekhyun can’t hear anything at all, but he can’t tell if it’s just the blood squeezing back and forth in his ears, too close to his head to think rationally, or the fact that every single person in the cafe is staring at him now, turned in their seats, watching him with a wary disdain. His own eyes, wide and nervous, dart for the emergency exit signs. There aren’t any, and instead, unintentionally, he ends up clumsily meeting the blank gaze of most of the cafe, the panic rising in his throat. No exit. No way out.

In fact, there’s a brick wall where the doors used to be, the entire cafe closing in on him, and Baekhyun’s windpipe starts to close.

“In a way, I blame myself, too,” Yixing continues softly; his head has bowed now, and Baekhyun, incredulous, wonders if he’s going to start crying. How can he? Baekhyun realizes after a moment that the blood rushing to his head is not only in fear, but in anger, strange and displaced. He doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to be pitied, or—for fuck’s sake, does he somehow deserve to be tortured? Wretched in pain? Who the fuck deserves something like that?

“I shouldn’t have been so kind to you all the time. I must have given you all kinds of ideas.”

Baekhyun’s eyes find the butter knife, still sitting against the plate with Yixing’s bagel crumbs.

“I made a mistake. I didn’t mean to reject you, like that.”

He could creep his arm across the table, close his fingers around it.

“I wanted to be with her, but you had already fantasized about some life we could have had together. It drove you mad, thinking you’d never have it. I understand that. I understand being so in love that it just...”

The condensation on the table, puddled around his relatively untouched ice tea, starts to dribble down the wood towards him, as if encouraging him forward.

“Why didn’t you hurt me, instead?”

The knife is in his hand, now. Yixing’s palms are flat on the table, as if waiting, willing. Patient. Yearning for the pain.

“Why didn’t you hurt me?”

Baekhyun starts to laugh, and it sounds ridiculous.

“Don’t you think I fucking _wanted_ to?” Baekhyun blurts out the words like they don’t come from his mouth, spitting them like they can’t possibly stay inside there any longer. All of the rage, the jealousy, it starts to build, like pieces of wood stacked together invitingly, like they’re just waiting to be struck with a match, to crumble and burn beneath the white hot flare of the flames. “You weren’t meant for her to have. You were supposed to be mine.”

The cafe crumbles around him, pieces of wood and stone, plaster and dry wall, crushing the customers and the tables and the glasses, the coffee and the display case of food and there’s just Baekhyun, and Yixing, and the table between them and the knife in Baekhyun’s hands. Dust clouds around them in big puffs of smoke. The air is thick with it, making his lungs burn when they breathe it in. Limbs are scattered, broken beneath split tables and large, broken fluorescent lights, and everyone looks like a mannequin, bent and twisted beneath the remains of the interior.

Yixing’s eyes are wet with tears when they stare at Baekhyun, but he can’t find anything left in the gaze that meets his.

 

 

And then Baekhyun jerks awake, suddenly, drenched in sweat.

“Breakfast,” the guard announces, shoving a plastic tray through the small opening in the metal door.

Baekhyun’s eyes are focused up on the brick ceiling. He doesn’t say anything.

“It’s pointless to talk to that one,” one of the other guards says, as he joins the first and moves down to the next cell. They have another hundred trays to get through, and each one is the same as the other—the same prison slop that will be served for lunch and dinner, too, but masked under another name to keep those annoying human rights activists at bay.

“What’s his deal?” The first guard chirps up again. He’s young and impressionable and thinks that if he can just figure out how a criminal becomes a criminal, then he can save the world.

Ridiculous.

“Tortured a girl. Really gruesome, batshit stuff... Kept saying she was in his way or something. They found her before he killed her, but it was too late,” the second guard gruffs out. Greedily, the prisoner in the next cell leans forward, eager to hear the details as he takes the tray. “She died in transit. Kid pled out. Mental issues. You know, the usual bullshit.”

“You don’t think it’s true?” The guard says, doubtfully, glancing back down the cell block. “He seemed pretty out of it.”

The second guard laughs.

“Well, would you want to live in a reality where you’re a murderer? The guilt would eat you alive.”  



End file.
